Towards realizing vision 2030: Input demand for renewable energy production in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Minerals are critical resources in manufacturing and operating renewable energy technologies. Therefore, mineral-producing countries step forward to nestle renewable energy hubs using these resources. Likewise, Saudi Arabia intends to move on an equal footing by designing the national vision 2030 to realize its sustainable development goals. Given this, our objective is to examine the input demand (e.g., mineral production, human capital-augmented labour) for the aggregate renewable energy and solar electricity production within the purview of the decomposed measures of geopolitical risks,' threats' and 'acts' under the Cobb-Douglas production function analysis. To this end, we apply the cross-quantilogram (CQ) technique to examine the causal quantile connectedness between the variables with their fat-tailed distributive feature using monthly data from January 2008 to December 2021. Our findings confirm the increasing return to scale in cumulative renewable energy and solar electricity generation in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, this finding implies that mineral production positively impacts total renewable and solar energy generation at the low and medium quantiles under short, medium and long memories. Also, human capital-augmented labour favourably influences these two clusters of clean energy transitions in all quantiles under entire memories. In addition, the geopolitical risk 'threats' measure elevates, and the 'acts' parameter downsizes these dynamics of energy transformations in whole quantiles. Therefore, we recommend optimizing mineral resources to reach Saudi Arabia's aspirated renewable energy trajectory amid worldwide geopolitical tensions.